Definition
Plain language
A database strategy where everyone works freely and clashes only get caught at the end, throwing away the loser's work.
As stated in the literature
OCC — a concurrency-control protocol where transactions run without locks and validate their read sets at commit, aborting and restarting on conflict; expensive for long-running agent transactions because an abort discards minutes of inference.
Also called: OCC
Why it matters: It works well when conflicts are rare but becomes costly for AI agents, since throwing out a clashed task can waste minutes of expensive computation.
For example, two people edit the same document freely, and only when the second tries to save does the system notice the clash and make them redo their changes.
Heard on the show
“Optimistic concurrency control, OCC.”Episode 150 — Don't Kill the Loser: A Different Way to Handle Two AI Agents Colliding